Hi Brandon,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 3: I’m actively figuring out what my interests are by trying one or more of them out in some way .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were self-direction, achievement, and security.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was emotional stability.
You said your top three talents were analytic, social, and verbal.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to get a job .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said flu shot .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said won’t get sick .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said too far .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When i go to the gym, then i will get a flu shot .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in instrument .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt helped when receiving critical feedback, and helped when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being classes .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Teacher or professor .
In one word, you said it made you feel happy .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
| |
| journey vs destination idea |
| interest is an emotion! |
| personality changes over tjne |
| i thought the discussion about learning rates was interesting and also not what I expected |
| use woop for better goals |
| mentors good for deliberate practice |
| ask for advice not feedback |
| mindset is very important |
| habits need to become an automatic response to be effective |
| the ta study was quite interesting |
| giver vs taker difference |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
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| Jimin Oh |
| Brandon always had such a great sense of humor throughout all of our interactions. He always made all of us laugh and was able to bring a warm demeanor to our group conversations. Brandon was always genuinely interested in our contributions, and he seemed like someone that would listen to what you said with no judgment. I really admired Brandon’s quick thinking and ability to quickly interpret the information in class - coupled with his sense of humor he really became someone that was easy to approach but also thrived in class. I am extremely thankful I got to meet Brandon!
I was extremely impressed by Brandon’s discovery project. I thought that his integration of the scaling up of recipes but also having some casual recipes was very demonstrative of his growth throughout the entire journey as well as how applicable this skill was in his daily life. As someone who also is a novice to cooking, Brandon’s journey was really impressive and I thought it really demonstrated his dedication to this skill. I would love to try some of his recipes, and I thought this project was truly a great indication of his ability to master his pursuits quickly! |
| Collin Lovelace |
| Brandon was our first team leader in Grit Lab, and for the rest of the course he continued to embody that role. Brandon made our group conversations so enjoyable and effortless with his friendly and easygoing nature. I know Brandon wasn't sure at the beginning what he wanted to his discovery project on and it really seemed he could have done anything. He ended choosing cooking and his may have been my favorite discovery project I saw. Brandon's story of missing home cooked meals was compelling, and it was inspiring to see how impressive the different meals he had made and how much he had improved. Brandon was a fantastic member of our team. |
| Keara Mcgowan |
| Dear Brandon,
First, I want to express how much of a joy it has been to get to know you this semester. You are genuinely so kind and easy to talk to, and I always loved our little conversations throughout Grit Lab catching up with each other. Your humor was always much appreciated, and our rants about procrastinating during the previous weekend when we had exams coming up were comforting haha. Even though I think everyone can agree that it is sometimes hard to not hit a wall in the late afternoon/at the start of a 3:30 class, you were upbeat and put us all in a great mood.
Your Discovery Project was so fascinating, not only because I love food (lol probably a common opinion) but also because it was inspiring to see how you made something like cooking that can be intimidating at first (or at least in my opinion… I honestly only know how to toast bread at this point) look easy and also enjoyable. After hearing about how it brought you and your friends enjoyment while cooking with each other, I am inspired to take on a goal of organizing cooking nights with my friends. The pictures in your presentation were impressive, and they definitely proved that when you put your mind to something, you can master it. I also wrote down the name of the youtube channel you included in your presentation and am excited to check out some of his videos myself.
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We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.